The Coldest Yard

By Nate Jackson

Jan. 15, 2014

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CreditCreditPing Zhu

LOS ANGELES — IF I were to attack you and slam you to the ground as you stood in line for your morning coffee, you might not get up. But if I put a helmet on you and put you on a football field, then did the exact same thing, you’d pop up and ask for another. There is something powerful about football, something that grants men temporary invincibility, makes them immune to pain and anguish.

I played for six seasons in the National Football League, from 2002 to 2008. I know this feeling well. It is empowering and intoxicating, but it has its consequences. The day after a football game, the adrenaline is dead. You are in pain. The next six days are a gradual buildup from Monday Mushmouth to Sunday Superman. By the time you step out of the phone booth for kickoff, nothing can make you flinch.

Not even snow and frigid cold. The Super Bowl this year will be played on Feb. 2 in East Rutherford, N.J. — not exactly the mild climate we’ve come to expect for our big game. This has some folks concerned. What if there’s a blizzard? Last week, the N.F.L. commissioner, Roger Goodell, declined to say whether the league would ever plan another cold-weather championship.

But don’t count the players among the worried. The elements are irrelevant, we tell ourselves. Waking up on game day to storm clouds and freezing temperatures only hammers home the need for an iron will. There is no pain.

That’s why you see players wearing no sleeves in freezing temperatures. It’s better to have the skin of your arms exposed when playing football, especially as a ball carrier, because one of the “points of pressure” when carrying the ball is the forearm. When you tuck it in tight, the pigskin and your skin make one skin, and the ball is easier to hold. If you put on some poly-techno-Lycra long-sleeve shirt, the intimacy is lost, and the ball falls to the ground.

Ever since I started playing football, the closer to naked I was, the more connected I felt to my task. I wore no undershirt under my pads, no cup (no one wears a cup) and no gloves until I got to the N.F.L. and my fingers started snapping like chicken bones. Finger injuries are a constant in the N.F.L., but you never hear about them because, c’mon, it’s your finger! Suck it up! I wore gloves for protection (as well as a thin strip of tape on each finger between each knuckle). But not for warmth. My idealism was hot enough.

But even idealism freezes up on the sidelines. Football is a lot of standing around for everyone, starters included. And for players like me, special teamers who play sparingly on offense or defense, staying warm on the sidelines is an art. Cold muscles don’t fire well. To step on the field cold and sprint 60 yards covering a kickoff is to dare the Laws of Snap.

The sideline benches are heated. They’re made of hollow metal and hot air is pumped through. Sit for too long and your ass burns. But your hamstrings are nice and loose. Next to the bench is also an industrial-size heater — it looks like an airplane propeller — that blows all game long. I stood in front of one on a cold December day once and turned my attention to the field. My parka caught on fire. I stopped, dropped and rolled.

Up in the stands there is beer to warm the heart. But not on the field. We played a game in Kansas City one year. It was very cold. I wasn’t suited up for the game. I was inactive, doing my best to stay warm. One of my fellow inactives handed me a Gatorade bottle with white athletic tape wrapped around it. Drink first, ask questions later. I took a swig: Gatorade’s newest flavor. Very similar to cognac.

Bad weather means staying on top of your equipment, which basically means the shoe and cleat. But when it snows, cleats can be rendered moot. After only a few steps, the snow can fill in the space between the cleats, turning the bottom of the shoe into a well-packed snow cone. This slows down the action on the field, but the ball is easier to handle than one soaked by rain. Snow games can be surprisingly high-scoring affairs.

There is a great leveling that happens when extreme weather hits. Game-week preparations are highly managed affairs, with coaches removing all the variables to control every last detail of the product. The game plan is followed with maddening precision, often to the point of stifling the football player’s raw athletic instinct. But on a gusty game day, the scripted plan blows away in the gale force, and what’s left are the best football players on planet Earth, playing the game they know how to play.

This is why we should cross our fingers for snow and cold in East Rutherford on Feb. 2. The elements grant the players a reprieve from no-variable football. There is only this ball, on this field, and us, together, screaming silently toward an invisible line, underneath a frozen banner of hope.

Nate Jackson is the author of “Slow Getting Up: A Story of N.F.L. Survival From the Bottom of the Pile.”